That’s the only possible explanation for their curious anachronisms. The Institute for Creation Research has just claimed that Mendel published his paper on genetics in 1866 to refute Darwin’s theory of pangenesis (which, by the way, was published in 1868). Furthermore, Mendel’s paper was initially rejected for publication by editors who were in thrall to the dogma of pangenesis, which, as was mentioned, wouldn’t be published for two years.

Wait…that means just about everyone in the 19th century must have had time machines!

Yeah, but real time machines only go forward… (one of the myriad ways we know they are lying, I suppose…)

I really have a time machine–I really truly do
A time machine I’d like to share with no one else but you.
We’ll travel through the future–no one knows just what we’ll see,
If you would just agree to share my time machine with me!

My time machine–Our time machine–will move through time and space;
And lead to–who can tell?– the future is a big, big place!
Our time machine goes forward–sometimes slowly, sometimes fast–
But always to the future, Love, and never to the past.

If you will share my time machine, the world is at our feet,
The past is what it always was; the future will be sweet.
The march of time is constant, and it will not be denied,
But time itself can fuck itself, if you are by my side.

I could honestly care less as to the year of publication; it doesn’t change the fact that evolution is absolutely true and creationism is absolute bullshit. Perhaps we need to let them know that Mendel is just as irrelevant today as is Darwin. Sure, these got got the ball rolling, but our knowledge today far surpasses even their wildest imaginations. But I suppose if they try to attack current knowledge they simply have their asses handed to them ala Lenski.

Apparantly, he reckons that it is a common misconception that medieval Christians believed the Earth was flat, and that this whole thing was invented by ‘Darwinists’ to smear Christianity. The only thing is, this is the source he got this from:

Even it first attributes this idea to Antoine-Jean Letronne and Washington Irving. The only problem this presents is that Irving died in 1859, and Letronne in 1848 (and it actually mentions this idea being in books published even earlier – Irving’s history of Columbus in 1828 and Letronne’s ‘On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers’ in 1834).

Patricia makes an excellent point! Oak Leaf Clusters for Cuttlefish, OM, Poet Laureate of Phyrangula! We could do an entire Gilbert and Sullivan style production with the proceeds of the Cuttlefish’s prolific keyboard.

As for the time machine, our path is clear. We borrow one from the creationist-types, reverse-engineer it, and then patent it the week before they start working on the blueprints!

Nerd – You may have something there. My cluckheads don’t give a damn.
Unlike you, most people don’t know that chickens just haul off and lay eggs.
Pullets that aren’t roosterd lay eggs. Once the roosterin’ happens, the girls stop layin, and start sittin. No more eggs.
The ignorance of where milk and eggs come from in America is disgusting.

For the Disco Institute, there is no lie too big, no distortion too great to keep them from their quest. They will lie, cheat, steal, distort, destroy and anything else they need to do to perpetrate their lie on the rest of us. Its just a matter of time before the word kill is added to that list.

What’s funny is that the reference Christine Dao, the ICR author, provides for that time-traveling assertion is a 1998 Journal of Heredity paper that actually gets the dates right, saying specifically that

Darwin began The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication in 1860 … and it was first published in 1868, two years after the appearance of Mendel’s Pisum paper….

They don’t care about anachronisms. They are getting any anti-evolution/science ‘information’ they can think up, out into the public, to instill doubt in the minds of all those millions that are ignorant of the facts. Most of the millions aren’t going to go to the trouble of looking up the real events. They don’t know the dates and they don’t care, it’s just one more doubt about the validity of evolution and therefore the veracity/intelligence/’political agenda’ of the scientific community.

Scientists squawking about how wrong the information is, will just confirm the ‘conspiracy’ in the minds of those that think that way and the others have just one more cause for a faint patina of suspicion on their trust in scientists. Added to the ‘vaccination debate’, the ‘global warming conspiracy’, peak oil, environmental ‘catastrophes’ and anything else sciency that inspires the effort of a vested interest to muddy the waters against it, the science community seems to be under siege.

Creationists are such ridiculous frauds. I knew the moment I read Christine Dao’s article that she was cluelessly babbling about things she didn’t understand. They display the superficial trappings of scholarship with their footnotes and their “research journals,” but it’s all a trumped-up fraud. But does Dao realize what a chump she is? I very much doubt it.

Wait…that means just about everyone in the 19th century must have had time machines!

Whereas the simplest hypothesis already explaining all the known facts without introducing any new entities or concepts is that the creationists are variously stupid, ignorant and dishonest (with a few side orders of insane) and are telling falsehoods … again.

I too doubt that many such people fully realise the depths of their condition. So many of them appear to be cargo-cultish “scholars”/”scientists” – with a dim idea that there’s something magical about the form in which research is presented (and of course the inclusion of many magic words in no particular order) but having totally missed the fact that the genuinely important part is instead the content (which has to be meaningful and accurate etc).

Some may have a bit of vague self-awareness though and be more towards the dishonest side than the others, in still hoping no-one else will notice that their output is a muddle (partly because they know they themselves can’t make out anything much more than a muddle from real science etc). However, I suspect there are lots of them who truly can’t tell the difference and wonder (on the rare occasions they think at all) why other people can. One could pity them for their confusion if they weren’t also so dishonest about it.

Random comments about earlier comments: #10 – Just read the Wiki summary about Zombies, and my brain hurts. I will stick with Heinlein’s “The Door Into Summer” time-travel book which still has me confused. #12 – Re the Veritasx source, it stresses “educated” people, something surely not relevant to the failed-education status of even the creatards wo do have letters afdter their name. And #16 – Patricia, it may be that the source of eggs is unknown, but clearly milk comes from the extra-terrestrial cows mentioned on another recent thread.

I do not think that there was any anachronism in this point of view. After all, Mendel’s work was published in 1868, 11 years after Darwin’s Origin of species. And, if it is true that Mendel’s work was not appreciated, Origin of species was very wel-known by 1868.

What is of more importance, is that Darwin addressed the question of heredity mechanism. In any case, the most famous controversy about heredity mechanisms and evolution theory was from Fleeming Jenkins. According to the first Darwinists, the issue of continuous (pangenetic) or discrete (Mendelian) inheritance was of secondary important. As a matter of fact, modern quantitative genetic combine pangenetic approaches and Mendelian ones.

The clash between ‘Darwinism’ and ‘Mendelianism’ occured only in the first decades of 20th Century. Some ‘science historians’ have called this period “Darwinian eclipse”. However, was in those decades, that Creationism was more marginalized in Biblical studies than it is today. The so-called Darwinian eclipse was superseded by the new synthesis theory (1930s-1950s): merging ‘Mendelianism’ and ‘Darwinism’ was extraordinary powerful and evolution became ‘the’ biological theory (‘Nothing in biology has sense without evolution’ – Th.Dobzhansky, 1973).

The point Creationists want to make is based in a personalistic/conspiracy approach to History of Science. And this point is not science. And no history, neither.

Even more intriguing, Paley published his famous “Natural Theology” in 1809 complete with arguments against Darwin’s theory of evolution – and of course Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” wasn’t published until 1859….. So intelligent design is based on Paley’s time travels! More mundanely, Paley was actually arguing against Erasmus Darwin, but that doesn’t stop IDiots from recycling his arguments. Sadly, they seem to miss out his fun speculations about self-replicating pocket watches being found on the famous heath. Nice to imagine Paley’s watches evolving….

Apparantly, he reckons that it is a common misconception that medieval Christians believed the Earth was flat, and that this whole thing was invented by ‘Darwinists’ to smear Christianity.

This is essentially true, except for the “Darwinist” smear bit. The cosmology of medieval Christianity was based on the Ptolemaic system (derived, in part, from Aristotle), which envisaged a spherical earth at the centre of a nested series of spheres which carried the sun, moon and planets. There were a few theologians who insisted that the earth was flat (and who sometimes get quoted as if they were representative), but they were a small minority going against the grain.

The myth that flat-earthism was a pre-scientific Christian orthodoxy was largely concocted in the 19th century, although as you note, it predated the rise of Darwinism. Two later popularisers of the myth were John William Draper in his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White, in History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), who might conceivably count as “Darwinists” (in the loose sense of accepting Darwin’s theory). However, their agenda had more to do with promoting secularism and declaring science’s independence from religion than advancing any specific scientific theory.

Stephen Jay Gould’s essay “The late birth of a flat earth” (in Dinosaur in a Haystack) provides a good summary (it’s also available online as a PDF.

Even more intriguing, Paley published his famous “Natural Theology” in 1809 complete with arguments against Darwin’s theory of evolution – and of course Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” wasn’t published until 1859….. So intelligent design is based on Paley’s time travels!

Don’t forget the trans-temporal adventures of David Hume, whose Dialogues concerning Natural Religion were published in 1779, and trashed Paley’s design argument 30 years before it was written.

Incidentally, I once did a reader’s report on a manuscript by an ID advocate who seriously described Paley’s Natural Theology as containing “criticisms” of Darwin’s theory. Needless to say, my report was negative (this was very much the least of the manuscript’s sins) and the book didn’t get published.

Oh, let’s not forget the article on the ICR site about James Clerk Maxwell. The admittadly great scientist’s complaint about evolution and the change implied revolved around his belief that “…the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, or generation or destruction…” What get’s me is the ICR chose to use that quote, since it is quite well known that matter does change. How oblivious to reality do you have to be to use a statement from Maxwell like that one to show how great he was for denying a branch of science he had no experience with. I now know completely and with utmost certainty what a creatard is.

Oh, let’s not forget the article on the ICR site about James Clerk Maxwell. The admittadly great scientist’s complaint about evolution and the change implied revolved around his belief that “…the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, or generation or destruction…” What get’s me is the ICR chose to use that quote, since it is quite well known that matter does change. How oblivious to reality do you have to be to use a statement from Maxwell like that one to show how great he was for denying a branch of science he had no experience with. I now know completely and with utmost certainty what a creatard is.

If I was a Creationist, I won’t use in any case this quotation from Maxwell. What Maxwell is advancing with this quotation is no simply an skeptical point regarding evolution, but the idea of an Eternal Universe, with no begining nor end. Evolutionism is opposed to Fixism. But Fixism is not equivalent of Creationism. The last scientific fixists from 19th century were Uncreationists or Eternalists.

No, Sili (#34), no time machine was needed to explain how Darwin indoctrinated Adolf Hitler with evolutionary dogma. Sneer Review revealed last May how Darwin sent Mrs. Hitler a copy of Origins along with a cover letter asking her to save it for her son Adolf, who would be born in eleven years. That Darwin was really forward-looking! (Some questions have been raised about the font that Darwin used in the letter, but I just figure that Darwin must have been an early adopter of the Macintosh.)

This is essentially true, except for the “Darwinist” smear bit. The cosmology of medieval Christianity was based on the Ptolemaic system (derived, in part, from Aristotle), which envisaged a spherical earth at the centre of a nested series of spheres which carried the sun, moon and planets.

Oh, yes, I’m aware that he is correct to say that it is a misconception that medieval folk thought the world was flat, but, as someone pointed out to him, even on the rare occasions this guy is correct, he also finds a way to be wrong, as he is in his claim that this was invented as a way to ‘defend Darwinism’ by smearing Christianity.

Oh, yes, I’m aware that he is correct to say that it is a misconception that medieval folk thought the world was flat

careful, that’s not exactly what he said.

look again:

The cosmology of medieval Christianity was based on the Ptolemaic system

just how much that translated into the average person thinking the world was flat or round at the time isn’t answered by talking about what the majority of xian theologians at the time agreed/disagreed on.

Thinking the world is flat is a natural extension of what seems obvious to someone who has never been shown otherwise.

I haven’t looked (guess what – there really isn’t a lot of data), but I’d guess there were quite a lot of “medieval folk” who indeed did think the world was flat.

The intelligensia of the middle ages and rennaisance belived that the Earth was round, What the commons belived may have been something else. I remember from my own childhood, a neighbor lady looking at my world globe and saying, ‘I never could see how the world was round.’

Looks like your argument is with Oxford Journal and the Journal of Heredity if anyone had bothered to check her foot notes.. why don’t you rag on “Journal of Heredity” instead. No PZ is always right– I forgot.

Mendel’s Opposition to Evolution and to Darwin
B. E. Bishop

Corresponding Editor: Stephen J. O’Brien

Abstract

Although the past decade or so has seen a resurgence of interest in Mendel’s role in the origin of genetic theory, only one writer, L. A. Callender (1988), has concluded that Mendel was opposed to evolution. Yet careful scrutiny of Mendel’s Pisum paper, published in 1866, and of the time and circumstances in which it appeared suggests not only that it is antievolutlonary in content, but also that it was specifically written in contradiction of Darwin’s book The Origin of Species, published in 1859, and that Mendel’s and Darwin’s theories, the two theories which were united in the 1940s to form the modern synthesis, are completely antithetical.

Pay attention, coacholson, Bishop’s argument in the Journal of Heredity is that Mendel was acquainted with Darwin’s Origin and published his paper on peas in opposition to it (despite never mentioning Darwin or evolution in his supposedly oppositional paper). Maybe, but doubtful.

Christine Dao, however, misread Wikipedia and Bishop and then asserted that Mendel published his paper in opposition to Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, which did not exist until after Mendel published. Dao is a creationist goof-up.

The point stands that Mendel was opposed to evolution as noted in the Journal. His views were “antievolutionary” according to the Journal. Darwin’s views on pangenesis were known about before he published in 1868.(Just as his views were known on “Origins” before he published in’59.) By the way, Wikipedia is not always known for complete accuracy, and most librarians don’t want their students to site it.:)

Pretty funny coming from “Nerd of Redhead” on where we learn science.Your argument is with Journal of Heredity friend not me on whether Mendel was antievolutionary. Yes, frequently wrong according to PZ Myers. I am going to “coach” you on some facts.

FYI on my point of his views were known before publication:

From: § 4. Darwin’s Bulldog

(Huxley thought) Darwinism is winning in Germany-May 29, 1865; and though pangenesis is not valid, Darwin ought to publish his hypothesis anyway- June 1, 1865 and July 16, 1865. Pangenesis was the word Darwin invented for his idea, expressed both in the Origin of Species (1859) and more clearly in the forthcoming Descent of Man that acquired characteristics may be inherited.

Coach, that is Dr. Nerd to you. PhD in a science. It is also Dr. Myers to you. You earn calling him PZ by listening to him. So quit talking science if you don’t know anything about it. Quit repeating items from creationist web sites as they are proven lies.

Coach Olson: It doesn’t really matter if Mendel was opposed to evolution or thought that his work somehow refuted it. Pangenesis was never more than a placeholder for a better idea. Such an idea was provided by Mendel. What matters is that Mendelian inheritance, regardless of Mendels’s thoughts, is a very good fit with Darwinian evolution.

coacholson The point stands that Mendel was opposed to evolution as noted in the Journal.

As “noted” in the Journal? No. As argued by Bishop. Hardly conclusive. As for citing Wikipedia, Dao cribbed from it without attribution (IMHO), so I’m not the one who started it. Besides, Wikipedia got the dates right, which was something Dao missed both in Wikipedia and Bishop’s own paper. Shame, shame!

V. Orel, emeritus director of the Mendel Museum in Brno, deals extensively with the ideas of Mendel about Darwin in his 1996 book “Gregor Mendel: the first Geneticist” (Oxford UP). – pp 188-199.Orel mentions that copies of the German translation of Origin of Species (1862) and Variation in animals and plants under domestication (1868) are present in the monastery library, with some annotation by Mendel. The annotations seem limited to what was directly relevant to Mendel’s own work. Orel states that Mendel was opposed to pangenesis and that no evidence on what Mendel thought of “descent with modification’ exists.

I remember seeing Mendel’s copy of Origin in the temporary Mendel exhibit at a museum (The Field in Chicago, maybe). Darwin had written something about not knowing the mechanism for the passing on of traits, and in the margin, Mendel had written something along the lines of”I think I have it”.

So if you don’t have answer, then pull rank– nice job. So only people with PhDs in science can be on this blog.sorry– I only have a Masters in science ed– I guess I have to kiss your big toe.
I am sure PZ was offended. Since you don’t respect Wells or Behe’s PhD, why should I respect your claim? I have seen Wells and Behe been referred to with vulgar names on this blog– I never see you defend them.
I don’t respect Dr. Myers for his rants and raves and intolerance. His unprofessional behavior is a shame.
“The only appropriate response should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy, far-right politicians…I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots.” Think of the uproar if he was conservative and he substituted right wing for left wing in the quote?

Dear Tresmal,

It does matter because that was the whole point of the posting by Myers and this whole time machine baloney. I refuted the point that Mendel did not know anything of pangenesis before Mendel wrote in 1866.
The other point is that Mendel did not believe in Darwinism is relevant, because that was the point of Dao’s article to the Texas board. If you have trouble with those facts argue with Journal of Heredity, Oxford Journals.

Zen

The point is that Bishop wrote for the Journal of Heredity which is more respected than Wikipedia and Bishop is not a Intelligent Designer but has enough integrity to admit the truth that you seem to have a problem with.

Heleen,

Thank you for the well thought out researched posting.

MarcusA,
Another pointless and ridiculous posting that has no bearing on the discussion.– Oops you might have a PhD in science and I can’t criticize it.

Coach, still having trouble with facts I see. Creationism/ID is not science. Never has been, never will be. To say otherwise is a lie. Most MSEd I’m familiar don’t practice science, and actually know very little. Their real degree is in eduction, not science. So yes, I sneer are your fake credentials.

If creationism is scientific, you could prove it very easily. Can you point to even 5 papers in the journals Science and Nature that support ID/creationism? If not, it isn’t science and you know it. There is a Nobel prize waiting for whoever shows evolution is wrong. But that requires publishing in the above journals, where groundbreaking science is often found. Until you find those articles, time to stay home.

Coach, what happened 140 years ago is not very relevant to todays science. So what may or may not have been a minor squabble then is totally irrelevant to today. All the data has been incorporated in the modern synthesis, or present evolutionary theory. The field has moved on. 140 years further on.

The only reason the creationist/ID people, who seem stuck back in the time of Darwin, try to bring up these things is make noise to fool people who don’t have a good grasp of science, how it works, and also how it doesn’t work. They equate noise with proof, which is wrong. They keep calling evolution “Darwinism”, which makes it sound like a cult of personality. Darwin was wrong on several things. Science acknowledges that. The theory adapted and moved on. While Darwin was the first to put the whole field together, and he is recognized as such, the present theory is called evolution.

On the roundness of the Earth: on the crowded train from Patrai to Athini in 1991, an Albanian teenager named Bledar Braoushi had just crossed a border for the first time in his life and wanted to practice English (and of course, none of the Greeks on the train would give him any time). I tried to explain where I came from, even drew a picture of a globe with Europe on one edge and Australia on the other, and he was totally incredulous. I estimate that Albania at that time is a pretty good proxy for much of Europe (never mind the rest of the world) in the Middle Ages (say 13th Century?), so I can now imagine a population for whom the idea of the earth NOT being flat has never come up.
We all have a time machine, but as Cuttlefish notes it only goes forward. At different rates, however, depending on which part of it you stand.

Dr. Nerd,
I didn’t say I as a practicing scientist (and by the way education is spelled this way). I was a very successful teacher by any means you want to measure it (peer review, administrative review, parent review etc). So that is objective evidence. What I said is that you pulling rank is hypocritical. I think you are probably an ivory tower professor locked up in your lab. Why should I respect a man that is a phony like Dr. (the great one) Myers. You don’t stick up for Wells when he is dragged through the mud. If 140 years ago doesn’t make any difference, please tell that to Dr. Myers who posted this subject on the “Time Machine” to begin with. Obviously to you since the whole basis of the posting is proven wrong, change the subject. So there should never be any science history taught??

Based on Dr. Myers terrible quote, then you must be

1. Against freedom of speech
2. Against teacher tenure laws
3. Litmus tests for science teachers graduating
4. For book banning in school libraries
5. For undoing administrators careful observations of classroom teachers and replacing it with Dr. Myers verdict of thumbs down.
6. For public harassment of public school teachers and ruining people’s livelihood.

Maybe you are for Red Guard tactics of sending offenders to reeducation camps?

I would like for you to produce a controlled scientific study that proves that teachers that believe in ID produce inferior science students. So until you prove that, you are only running on emotion and subjectivity. Show me some quantitative results Dr. Science!

Now isn’t this more interesting to everyone involved than seeing posting after posting of mindless dittos to anything that Doctor Paul Myers says?? It gives you a chance to vent your frustration to someone on the other side.

Coach, what a load of paranoid shit. I would ask you to justify each assertion just to watch you squirm, but it isn’t worth the effort.

Coach, you need to learn how science works. First of all, god cannot be the cause or result of any observation. So any theory that requires god is not scientific (this includes creationism/ID). Period, end of story. There is no questioning of that. Science and god divorced a couple of centuries ago, in case you haven’t heard. This is my second lesson to you. The first lesson was that science is found only in the scientific literature.

Now the whole kerfluffle is backed by the ID (non-science) people, so the kerfluffle is irrelevant to science today. Can you prove it is relevant to science today? You can’t. The body of theory and knowledge that comprises science isn’t changed one way or another. A minor historical footnote at best.

I am not Dr. Myers sycophant. I’m just another working scientist who recognizes bullshit and calls people like yourself out on it when they claim something is scientific or relevant to science when it is not. I have subscribed to Skeptical Inquirer for twenty years, so I am well aware of the games the ID play. If you don’t want to be called out, then you have to quit parroting (sycophantly) the ID people. At this site, you will be called out every time by somebody.

Phantom reader: Get real. Quit giving phony accusations– Like I am suppose to have a guilt trip.

Please tell me if this is a lie as a quote from PZ Myers and I will take back what I said. If you think this is okay fine– then think about the implications of what he said.

“The only appropriate response should involve some form of righteous fury, much butt-kicking, and the public firing of some teachers, many school board members, and vast numbers of sleazy, far-right politicians…I say, screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots.”

Dr. Nerd– Maybe you should quit parroting “Skeptical Inquirer” and their arguments for the past 20 years. A good debater and professional doesn’t swear at his opponent.

Coacholson, you are playing the paranoia card. While I think PZ’s imagery is over the top here, all he is suggesting that the defenders and promoters of science get busy in the schools and school boards.

The public firing of teachers is the firing of science teachers who do not teach science, i.e. teach religion in the guise of creationism. In essence, this is firing teachers for incompetence.

In order to do this, people need to reclaim the school boards from the promoters of ID. One of the wedge issues of recent decades has been the taking over of school boards in order to destroy the teaching of science. And, yes, these people are right wingers.

Now let us take a look at your paranoid claims.

Based on Dr. Myers terrible quote, then you must be

1. Against freedom of speech
Because religion should not be taught as a science?

2. Against teacher tenure laws
One only gets tenure when one is shown to be able to do their job.

4. For book banning in school libraries
How so. Like most people, I think their should be a copy of the bible, the qu’ran and other religious texts in school libraries. How will the teaching of science lead to book banning?

5. For undoing administrators careful observations of classroom teachers and replacing it with Dr. Myers verdict of thumbs down.
This is about creationists getting on school boards and destroying science classes. Would you like these same people making changes in math, say making pi=3 as it is stated in the bible?

6. For public harassment of public school teachers and ruining people’s livelihood.
So you are arguing that all incompetent people should keep their jobs, even when they show they cannot do it?

Maybe you are for Red Guard tactics of sending offenders to reeducation camps?
That is a mighty huge leap there.

You are yelling at Nerd for not being able to debate. Yet you have not shown that you have any logic to back up your claims. Nerd has every right to be as dismissive of you as he was.

Janine, I’m not expecting a quick answer. I don’t understand the fascination for old threads for some people, so I’m trying to move this discussion forward. (Actually I think he was just trying to get in the last word.) I don’t really expect him to post on today’s creationism thread.

The coach doesn’t like being the student, but he has to learn how science works so that we can finally have an intelligent discussion about evolution. Once he learns how science really works, then he can understand that creationism and ID are religious ideas, confirmed as such by courts of law, and that these religious ideas have no place in the science classroom. So the discussion will be on why religion should be presented in the science classroom, and very focused on that issue.

Coach, Still no Nature or Science references for ID? No surpise there. First a recap of your previous lessons.

First lesson, science is found only in scientific journals. Scientific journals are often sponsored by scientific societies, but there are some commercial publishers who follow the same rules as the scientific societies. They have editors with strong scientific backgrounds, usually in the field the journal covers, and use peer review for determining worthiness for publication.

Second lesson, that god is not used for scientific observations, and science cannot prove or disprove god. Science ignores god. This second lesson is confirmed by two court cases. In Epperson V. Arkansas in 1968, the Supreme Court said that creationism is a religious idea, not a scientific idea, and therefore should not be taught in science classes. This was later extened to ID via Kitzmiller V. Dover in 2005 with a decision so strong the likelyhood of it being overturned is very small. So neither creationism or ID are sciences. Science knew that, and the law agrees. The religious need to get with the program.

Todays third lesson is that science can only be refuted by science. Since science requires positive proof, if you wish to knock down a theory, you first must show the evidence that doesn’t fit that theory. Not questions, doubts or philosophy, but evidence. And per the first lesson, the evidence must be published in the scientific literature. A wounded theory tends to stand until either the evidence is properly explained to fit the theory, the theory expands to fit the evidence, or a new theory is proposed. None of this has happened in the scientific literature with regard to evolution. There are hunderd of thousands, if not millions of scientific papers confirming evolution.

I am writing the lesson plans for your further education if you need it.

Any scientists that are dissenters you will trash such as Behe. Some that are notable such as Werner Arber 1978 Nobel Prize winner in Medicine and Physiology who said “although a biologist, I must confess I do not understand how life came about.., The possibility of the existence of Creator, of God, represents to me a satisfactory solution to this problem.”
Francis Collins (genome project) believes in a Creator. “It is humbling for me and awe-inspiring to realize that we have caught the first glimpse of our instructions book, previously known only to God.”
Ernest Chain 1945 Noble prize winner said evolution is a “hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts.” You don’t have to revert to 200 hundred years ago. GW Carver is another clear modern notable dissenter.

Lest we forget the posting started by claiming the Christine Dao was wrong about Mendel. And that she didn’t know when Darwin published his work on pangenesis. Well..,”Theories of mathematics, statistics and physics as applied to biology were foreign to Charles Darwin who, in his Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), [i] adopted and adapted the old theory of “pangenesis”, first put forward by Hippocrates (460-377 BC). According to this theory…, We now know that Mendel was aware of Darwin’s theory of pangenesis, and that he disagreed with it (as did Darwin’s close friends, T.H. Huxley and John Lubbock).”

He obviously did know about pangenesis before Darwin’s book and didn’t have to wait for 1868. Darwin started working on it in 1860.

No– I don’t read this post very often. I do have better things to do.

You really have no concept of what it takes to be a junior high teacher. You obviously do not have access to my reviews and recommendations written by evolutionists and liberals that happen to be pragmatists and not kooks like PZ Myers. Sure kids should know what evolutionists believe and that it is the prevailing theory. They should not be forced to believe it or failed if they don’t. They should know the history of science. Students should have the right to access information from the library if they want to (that should be there).
Yes– I am looking at old posts–as you are too. You can go back to preaching to the choir.

I’ll be back tomorrow or the next day for your next lesson. You need to learn some science. By the way, quotes aren’t science, so they will have no effect on your lesson or my conclusions. I don’t know where you picked up the idea that they did, except by believing religious creationist/ID literature. Time for you to get rational, or go away.

A quick recap of your previous lessons.
1) Science is only found in the scientific literature.
2) Science cannot prove or disprove god, and cannot use god as an explanation.
3) Science is only refuted by science.

Todays lesson is that science requires evidence. The evidence has to be collected and proper records maintained. When publishing findings, the evidence for those findings need to be published with the paper or cited within the paper if previously published. Findings need to be described in a way so that any other scientist can duplicate the results if they follow the same process. The burden of proof is always on those making the claims. For example, if I claim I made a new compound, I would need to describe in gory detail how I made the compound, and then describe the measurements I used to confirm that I made the new compound. Typically this would require mass spectrum to confirm the mass is correct, NMR (molecular version of MRI) of both hydrogen and carbon nuclei to confirm the number and types of atoms present. And if required, single crystal X-ray diffraction to actually show the molecule. So to recap, the positive evidence for you are claiming must be shown or cited.

When there are two competing scientific theories, the one that generates the most proof positive will ultimately win. Just showing proof negative does not mean the other theory is correct. Proof positive is required.

Your ID theory fails both the second lesson (uses god) and the previous paragraph. It acts as proof negative toward evolution is proof positive for ID. That is just a barefaced lie. When asked to show the proof positive for ID, the question is smoothly evaded. There is no wonder on why science looks down on the DI. They aren’t scientific, but pretend to be.